Gossip from Confucius City 3
Huang Jing Yuan
黄静远
Production date
2012
Object Detail
Media
acrylic on paper
Measurements
59 x 59 cm
Notes
Gossip from Confucius City (2011), a conceptual project for which she created a fictitious institute and its museum, was inspired by the state-sponsored Confucius Institute, an arm of Chinese soft power that aims to spread Chinese language and culture across the world. Huang Jing Yuan created a series of paintings that resemble black and white photographs, critiquing the over-blown images produced by the apparatus of state propaganda. Starting with small, hand-made collages, she layered cut out figures from diverse sources to create surreal, theatrical pictures in which strange characters act out ambiguous narratives. There is a sense of rupture and unease. Foregrounds are disassociated from backgrounds, as if two entirely disconnected events have been slammed together by some unexpected slippage in the space-time continuum.
Using tiny brushes and a monochrome palette Huang painstakingly copied her collages in a very small format with magnified detail and extreme realism. This deliberate process of distancing, in hand-made versions of works that are themselves already copies, mimics the ways images are filtered, manipulated, reproduced, shared and infinitely recombined in an image-saturated world. Each fictional image appears hyper-real, like a photograph from a fantastical parallel universe. Their satirical intent is emphasised by elaborately carved black frames, a reference to the interior decoration excesses of China’s rich and powerful new elites.
Gossip from Confucius City 3 depicts an ambiguous space that might be a Chinese museum. A prone, white-clad female figure, represented with oddly vertiginous foreshortening, holds a bird to her breast. Two enormous statues of gods, demons or warriors tower over her. The entire space has the artificial ‘oriental’ feel of an old Hollywood movie set. Size and scale are disquietingly strange — the small figures of people in the doorway and around the walls appear tiny in relation to the figure lying on the floor. The effect is unsettling. Normal reference points are under threat, as in the fragmentary, disconnected narrative of a dream. Huang Jing Yuan suggests that her contemporary Chinese world of unceasing change is also filled with mysterious events and nonsensical rituals.
Using tiny brushes and a monochrome palette Huang painstakingly copied her collages in a very small format with magnified detail and extreme realism. This deliberate process of distancing, in hand-made versions of works that are themselves already copies, mimics the ways images are filtered, manipulated, reproduced, shared and infinitely recombined in an image-saturated world. Each fictional image appears hyper-real, like a photograph from a fantastical parallel universe. Their satirical intent is emphasised by elaborately carved black frames, a reference to the interior decoration excesses of China’s rich and powerful new elites.
Gossip from Confucius City 3 depicts an ambiguous space that might be a Chinese museum. A prone, white-clad female figure, represented with oddly vertiginous foreshortening, holds a bird to her breast. Two enormous statues of gods, demons or warriors tower over her. The entire space has the artificial ‘oriental’ feel of an old Hollywood movie set. Size and scale are disquietingly strange — the small figures of people in the doorway and around the walls appear tiny in relation to the figure lying on the floor. The effect is unsettling. Normal reference points are under threat, as in the fragmentary, disconnected narrative of a dream. Huang Jing Yuan suggests that her contemporary Chinese world of unceasing change is also filled with mysterious events and nonsensical rituals.
Accession number
2012.037